Is Sales Wasting Your Marketing Dollars?

February 27, 2008 12:00 AM

By Linda Passante

Marketers used to believe their job was done as soon as sales leads started coming in the door. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how marketing dollars are wasted. Successful marketers help turn leads into customer conversions because they understand that ultimately sales is the most valuable metric for measuring marketing efforts.

In attempting to fulfill their responsibility to connect campaigns to the bottom line, CMO's have discovered that their efforts are hampered by poor conversion rates resulting from an underperforming sales team. So, marketing needs to understand how to communicate with the sales department and effectively motivate the team responsible for converting leads. Here are the right questions to ask the sales management team and assess whether the right processes are in place for success.

How can Sales Management get the most out of their sales team?
The sales team leader needs to develop a better understanding of the people in the team he or she is leading. The critical question to ask is if the salesperson had an additional ($X) amount of money, how would he or she spend it? Unfortunately, most sales team leaders do a superficial job of understanding the needs of the people in their team. Here is a typical situation. Sales Management increases a salesperson's sales quota versus last year. There are two things to keep in mind. First, the quota will likely not be achieved if the company lacks a compensation plan that rewards the salesperson for this increased production. When Sales Management sets the yearly quota, they need to answer the critical question: What is in it for the salesperson? Second, the team leader needs to know each salesperson's motivational drivers. How will the incremental income generated by achieving the increased production affect his or her life and the family that depend on him or her? The rudder that steers the ship is aligning the individual personal goals of the team member with the goals of the organization.

What's the most effective way to have a sales team take ownership of the sales process?
Tie the performance goal to a sales behavioral plan. If this year's goal exceeds last year's performance, you should identify what activities they need to be doing now that they weren't doing last year. Exceptional salespeople make their own opportunities, irrespective of market conditions. They typically do this by reaching out to new prospects and expanding the scope of existing relationships. An effective team leader will help each salesperson develop a behavior plan designed to meet the quotas. The plan should include metrics for expected behavior (i.e., number of cold calls, networking events, external referrals received, qualifying meeting with prospects, closing meeting with prospects, current client up-selling, qualifying and closing meetings, strategic alliances secured, etc.).

In establishing a behavioral plan, how can you manage the progress of your sales team?
Develop a mechanism to track each salesperson's behavior, and review actual versus planned behavior on a regular basis. There are a number of contact management systems that now allow a company to customize and track.

Most companies evaluate a salesperson's performance based solely on sales results. The problem is sales results don't often occur until well after the salesperson's behavior or lack of behavior. The amount of time separating the two is predicated on the length of a company's sales cycle (i.e., the typical amount of time to move an inquiry through pre-qualifying, qualifying, requirements, validation, negotiation, and close stages). This can take weeks, months, or even years based on the company's products, services, and the requirements of the potential buyers being targeted.

To illustrate this point, if a company's performance metric is solely sales results and they typically have a six-month sales cycle, the team leader would not know until July whether the salesperson was doing the necessary prospecting activity in January. By the time the team leader could take corrective measures, it might be too late to affect sales results in the company's current fiscal year.

How would you ensure buy-in on the part of the sales staff to protect your investment in a new sales management approach?
Have your salespeople sign a contract. It should outline the behaviors that they pledge to perform in meeting the sales quotas. Each salesperson would also agree to report honestly and factually his or her actual sales activities versus the plan. In addition, the team leader should sit down to adjust, refine, coach, and mentor every few weeks with each team member. During these sessions, the team leader should keep the personal goals in alignment with the business goals, thus achieving the highest level of motivation.

Tim Brenton is President and founder of the Brenton Group, Inc., [www.brentongroup.com] a sales, sales management, and negotiating skills training company located in Boston, MA. He has a national reputation as speaker and trainer to professional services companies looking to create high-performance business development people. Some of Tim's accounts include EMC, Palm, HP, McCann Worldgroup, American Association of Advertising Agencies, The Halo Group, The Boston Globe, and Boston Private Bank & Trust Company. He can be reached at tbrenton@brentongroup.com.

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